Tina Peters

Tina Peters (born 1955/1956) is a former County Clerk of Mesa County, Colorado. She was covered in regional, national, and international news since 2020 relating to her views on the conspiracy theory of election fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and with respect to an instance in which subsequent access to Mesa County voting machines was given. She was "one of at least twenty-two election deniers vying [in 2022] to take charge of elections in eighteen states." She was the first elections official in the U.S. to face criminal charges related to stolen election conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 United States presidential election. Chronology Her position as county clerk with Mesa County was her first elected office held, when she was elected in 2018. She campaigned with a platform that called for improvement in service from Colorado state's Division of Motor Vehicles' offices. In February 2020, employees in Peters' office admitted to discovering 574 uncounted ballots cast for the November 2019 election in a parking lot ballot box in front of the Mesa County election headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado. Workers had failed to empty the ballot box and the ballots remained there for months before being discovered, which Peters attributed to "human error". Given the margin of victory in all elections, this late finding did not change the outcome of any races. This incident and other issues led to a voter recall attempt for Peters from April to August of 2020. The recall effort failed to gather the minimum required number of 12,129 signatures by about 1,200 signatures for the issue to appear on the ballot in the November 3, 2020 general election. On November 19, 2020, Peters signed off on the results of a risk-limiting audit in Mesa County, Colorado stating there were no issues or discrepancies with the results. After the election, Peters permitted access to voting machines to an outsider. On May 17, 2021, Peters allegedly shut the office cameras off according to an email request sent from Mesa County Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley that the Secretary of State's Office later cited in its lawsuit. The email request mentioned that the office would turn the cameras back on August 1, 2021. Secretary of State Griswold's investigators found that Peters had ordered her staff to turn off the video surveillance meant to monitor the voting machines a week before the breach.